Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the one hundred and second installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Nancy Stanlick. Nancy is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida (UCF). She has published three books in American philosophy, two books in ethics, and one which is a modernized edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan. She likes to play video games but rarely has much time for them. Outside-work interests are simply spending time with family and friends, which of course includes cats.

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Nancy! As readers and listeners of Dialogues on Disability may recall, you did an interview with me in the very first year of the series. I know that some professional changes have taken place for you. Please bring us up to date in that regard.

For the past 13 years, I progressed through a few administrative ranks in the dean’s office of the College of Arts and Humanities at UCF, finally leaving college administration as associate dean just last month, on August 8, to chair my department. It is very good to be back in my academic discipline again and to work closely again with the two associated disciplines in my department: humanities and cultural studies and religion and cultural studies. Sometimes, you don’t realize how much you have missed something until you return to it.

[Description of photo below: Nancy, who is in an office, is looking down, perhaps at the computer taking the photo, and is smiling. Nancy is wearing wire-framed glasses, a white shirt, and dark jacket, and has short brown hair.]

In your contribution to the Dialogues on Disability centennial edition, Nancy, you mentioned that several people contacted you following your previous interview. Without divulging confidences, please characterize these conversations. Are they representative of the feedback about, and reactions to, your interview that others have had?

Most of the people who contacted me said that they appreciated the openness that everyone who contributes to your series has expressed. For example, talking about or writing about a disability is sometimes very difficult, since it is often the case that while nondisabled people try to understand what it is like to have a physical or psychological dis- or different-ability, they often say they simply cannot do so.

Others who have spoken or written to me–who have a disability themselves–have said that they can “identify” with the roadblocks that we sometimes find in our paths. With that said, I can say with some confidence that, in my own case, either I put the roadblocks down on my own, unwittingly or unintentionally; or, they are simply the result of the kind of disability that strikes almost all of us as we get older, that is, things just don’t work as well as they did when we were younger. Because the disability (or rather, disabilities now) that I have are manageable and often unknown to others, most of the time they go unrecognized or unmentioned, unless I mention them.

Nancy, you have indicated to me that a peculiar reaction remains about the ways in which you are disabled, including amongst medical professionals, as well as amongst acquaintances. Please describe this reaction and provide us with some insight about why it occurs.

I thought this question might come up. It gives me the opportunity to expand on what I said in response to the previous question. Even though I said that some of the roadblocks–maybe even many of them–are put in place by myself or are simply due to the effects of time and, hence, are likely nobody’s fault but my own, there are instances in which other people, including medical professionals, react strangely to the colostomy.

For example, about a month ago, I was working in the yard (I live in Florida, which, as you might know, is not always a joy) and it was exceptionally hot out that day, with the heat index around 112 degrees Fahrenheit. I was moving gravel, which is heavy, from one spot to another and decided that I would sit down on the ground and just move the little rocks a few at a time where I wanted them, doing it by hand rather than with a shovel.

Bad idea. Who would have thought that leaning to the right in a sitting position would result in tearing a muscle in my abdomen? I should have kept shoveling. I mean, really, that’s weird. The pain over the next couple days was really rough. Finally, I went to the ER. The ER physician, upon finding out that I have this “contraption,” decided (for whatever reason) that instead of manually touching that area, it would be better simply to do a CT scan.

I didn’t mind the CT scan, but it revealed nothing. I continued to experience pain from time to time, even after several weeks. So, I decided a few days after that experience to go to the surgeon who performed the original surgery. He did not hesitate to actually examine the area by hand. He said that he could feel the spot that did not show up in the CT scan; that is, he’s the one who determined that it was a torn (fortunately not severely) muscle on the other side of my abdomen, relatively far away from the colostomy. There was no reason why the ER physician could not have done that. The CT wasn’t a bad idea: something completely different and much worse might have been happening. However, I might have derived just a little peace of mind if I had found out at the time what was causing the pain rather than wondering about it and worrying about it.

Yet another worry has begun to take hold over the years; it is I who is amplifying this disability or particular ability. I have begun wondering whether something will go wrong with the colostomy due to aging. Anything is possible, of course, but it does not seem likely. Nevertheless, I worry about this possibility because the older one is, the longer it takes one to heal from a surgery and the more serious that such things can be.

So, I guess what I am driving at is that aging, I think, is itself a kind of “disability” insofar as there are physical things that I used to be able to do and can still do, but that I cannot do as well, nor with the same intensity or for as prolonged a period of time as I did them in the past. That annoys me. I still cut grass, trim the yard, and work outside, but it gets more and more difficult or tiring than the way that things used to be. And that’s hard to take. My head thinks that I am twenty-five years old; my body, however, is trying very hard to provide my head with new and updated information.

One of your areas of specialization in teaching is applied ethics. How, if at all, have you incorporated disability in these classes? Will you do so in the future?

I’m glad that you asked these questions because I have not had the opportunity in the past several years to teach very often. Now that I am back in the department, with a different kind of administrative work, I will have the chance to teach more often. So, the short answer is that I have not taught an ethics class in a while, not a full-fledged, semester-long course. In the past few years, I have, however, done both seminars for graduate students and presentations for undergraduates on applied ethics, while paying a lot of attention to the value of applied ethics and applied humanities, generally. I have been asking around in my department about everyone’s view of focusing more on the applied areas in our disciplines.

For example, I know that at least two of my colleagues in the department are interested in philosophy of disability; in addition, I would like, at some time, to do some academic research in the area myself, in a more formal way than I have done so far, perhaps finding a way to help others with a disability similar to mine and providing assistance to others who are struggling. I have done this sort of assistance and guidance one-on-one for a few people that I know who have an intestinal diversion like mine or similar to it; but I would like to take that a bit further in additional ways. What I mean by that is, again, practical application, such as a theme in an ethics class in the future focused on disability or working with others to develop a specific course on the ethics of disability or philosophy of disability more generally. Such a course would interest undergraduate students in pre-health professions majors and even some graduate and medical students, as well as philosophy students.

Nancy, you mentioned that you are disabled in new ways that you were not disabled at the time of your previous interview, as well as that these new ways in which to be disabled are not usually taken very seriously. Would you like to tell us more about what you meant in that context?

Back in 2020, right around Thanksgiving, I was outside with my niece putting up Christmas lights on my sister’s house. We plugged in a set of lights and the light hit my left eye in a certain way, causing me to get a wicked migraine. It cut off the vision in my left eye almost completely and my head pounded fiercely. So, I took some Tylenol and got horizontal for a while until it subsided, that is, until the next day. Over the next several months, I had similar fierce, horrible migraines literally every other day. I would, in other words, get a “day off” from them, and then the next day, I would be hit with another one. It was absolutely horrible.

I have had migraines from time to time for many, many years, but never every other day. That’s just way out of the realm of reasonable or acceptable. I went to my family doctor who prescribed a medicine that worked, but it also made it so that I could barely walk in a straight line. In other words, it contained some kind of pain-killing ingredient that had a negative effect on me (and that’s an understatement). I could not keep taking that.

So, I went to a neurologist who had to prescribe–likely, I suspect, because of insurance limitations–a medication that caused worse side-effects than the migraines themselves. I will not elaborate, but it was a most unpleasant experience; and, in any case, the medication no longer worked after several months, so the migraines returned with a vengeance. Finally, two new medicines were approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the kind that are calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) inhibitors, and they work! Well, they mostly work. Together, they cost about $3000 US a month. When I first started taking one of them, it had not yet been approved by my insurance company. Fortunately, the pharmaceutical company decided that since insurance would not pay for it, they would send it to me at no cost.  About ten months later, the insurance company put this second medication in their category of things that they would cover.

My point in all this explanation is to say that it is expensive to have a disability and, to add insult to injury, so to speak, when you have to take a day off for a really bad migraine, people will sometimes say things like, “Oh, I get those and just take an aspirin” or whatever they take, implying that after they do so, they’re “good to go.” If that’s all you have to do, then it is not a migraine. The standard view, which I have seen in the Migraine Again online newsletters to which I subscribe, is that people generally tend to think “It’s just a headache.” It’s not. Not when it is so intense that it reduces your vision, affects your mobility, limits your toleration for light, and causes you to feel, for hours on end, as if your head is about to explode. In fact, the information that I have derived from the neurologist and from reading a lot about migraines indicates that they are among the most common disabling conditions around the world.

On the bright side, the medicines I now take (the CGRP inhibitors ) have resolved the problem of feeling as if I have the “incredible exploding head.” Nevertheless, even these medications do not work perfectly. I rarely miss work due to migraines. When I do, it’s for a very, very good reason.

I guess, in short, I wish that people would not adopt a flippant attitude toward the pain or conditions of others, but rather would realize that their experiences are not necessarily the same as the experiences of the person to whom they are talking. If I tell someone that I simply cannot go somewhere or do something because of a migraine, it would be great if the person would not offer me weird suggestions such as that I should “get past it” or “get over it” and would not think that I am merely exaggerating. I would love to be exaggerating about how bad migraines are and can be. But I’m not.

Nancy, would you like to make any additional comments about something that you’ve discussed in this interview or something that you didn’t mention yet? Are there books, articles, or films that you would like to recommend to our readers and listeners?

I would suggest that people who want to know about intestinal diversions from those with direct experience of them should go to the ostomy.org website. If they want to know about migraines from the people who experience them, they should follow one of the links to Migraine Again provided in this interview or search for Migraine Again online themselves. Both of these sources of information are great: the former is a discussion board where people post questions, answers, comments, and helpful tips for others with intestinal diversions; the latter offers articles written by people with migraines.

While the colostomy is now, for me, in almost every way not much more than just a “different” ability, there’s nothing, in my view, “enabling” about migraines. What I mean to say is that the colostomy kept me from dying. It has–many would likely say “oddly enough”–made my life better. But the migraines? I think there is no way in which they count as an ability. They are disabling, painful, and downright horrible. I would trade the migraines for the colostomy any day, any time.

Much of disability is a matter of perspective, I guess. It is, perhaps, what you become accustomed to, what you do, in fact, “get over” or “get past” when you have a disability or more than one. Sometimes, there’s no getting over it or past it at all. Disabilities are amplified, in various ways, by the attitudes and actions of others. Some are more disabling to one person than they are to another person. An important point to make is that a disability affects different people in different ways, even when they have the same sort of disability. If you are lucky, you do “get over” or “get past” things in one way or another and work through them, figuring out how to deal with disability and live the best life that you can. I hope for those of us who experience disability that we are able to find ways to do just that or to find medicines and physicians and friends and relatives who help us to do just that. I think that is a positive spin on things.

Nancy, thank you very much for another insightful interview. Readers and listeners are encouraged to check out the online resources that you have recommended. I also want to direct readers and listeners of this interview to Christine Overall’s work on aging, including her interviews for Dialogues on Disability, which can be found in the series archives here, and to Kelly Oliver’s interview (also in the Dialogues on Disability archives) in which she discusses at some length her experiences with migraines.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Nancy Stanlick’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, October 18th, 2023, for the 103rd installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.